In “Dying for You,” Charli XCX sings, “cause you’re the poison I drink, I drink you twice to be sure.” The song is on her new album, “Wuthering Heights,” and was written for Emerald Fennell’s screen adaptation of Emily Bronté’s 1847 novel about the toxic love that binds Catherine (Margot Robbie) to her father’s ward, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi).
Fennell’s adaptation — styled “Wuthering Heights” in quotation marks to connote that it is not a strict interpretation of the gothic text — was inspired by the “profound connection” the director felt to the book as a teenager. With the film, she “wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14.”
Fennell’s version of the classic story feels exactly like the kind of ruinous love someone would ruminate in their childhood bedroom while listening to angsty music and imagining that romantic love is supposed to hurt to be real. Put another way, Fennell purposefully sets aside some of the story’s larger themes of gender, class and race to distill it into one of childhood infatuation that evolves into adult devastation.
The result is that viewers looking for a straightforward adaptation of the book are sure to be disappointed, especially since it ignores over half of the source material. However, if you’re like me and open to a cinematic experience that feels like an amorous 14-year-old’s fever dream about a disastrous love story full of irreverent longing that is symbolized through viscous objects like egg yolks and gelatinous fish mouths, then this is the movie for you. Because, like such a dream, it’s visceral and hard to look away and makes you feel everything.
Fennel also makes no attempt to hide that this is exactly what she’s doing. Hence, the title’s quotation marks, which are felt before the first image even appears on screen. The movie opens with moans and grunts. At first, it sounds like sex, but when the scene appears, it is a man being hanged in front of a crowd. As soon as his neck snaps, the crowd below becomes titillated by his visible erection. This scene, which subverts audience expectations by juxtaposing the horrible and the horny, immediately sets the film’s tone.
Even though this moment appears nowhere in the book, it reminds me of the novel’s opening page in which Heathcliff’s estate on the cold, windswept Yorkshire Moors is paradoxically referred to as a “misanthropist’s Heaven.” It’s a fitting description for both the opening scene and the poisonous love story that is about to unfold.
Cathy and Heathcliff meet as children when her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), takes him in as a random act of charity. Together, they suffer the abuse of the drunk and erratic man, mistaking the way they cling to each other for survival as a connection. The pull between Cathy and Heathcliff becomes even more complicated once they are older, and he is capable of using one hand to lift her by the corset to his lips. Suddenly, a sexual undercurrent is made explicit.
However, the chemistry between Cathy and Heathcliff is no match for the reality of poverty. After Mr. Earnshaw drains the household coffers, Cathy is compelled to accept the marriage proposal of her wealthy neighbor, Edgar (Shazad Latif). Even though she knows she loves Heathcliff, she can’t “degrade” herself by marrying him. In response to her decision, Heathcliff rushes away from Wuthering Heights on horseback and disappears for five years.
While he’s gone, Cathy moves into the lavish and anachronistically stylized estate next door where she passes the time with Edgar’s sister, Isabella (Alison Oliver), and her companion since childhood, Nelly (Hong Chau). Eventually, Heathcliff returns as a wealthy man with the gold tooth and gold earring to prove it, and Cathy can satisfy her longing.
She begins a torrid affair, proving to both Heathcliff and herself that, as Charli XCX sings, he is the “gun to my head,” “wound to in my chest,” and “favorite jewelry worn just like a noose ’round my neck.”
From here, there is Heathcliff’s mutually manipulative marriage to Isabella and Nelly’s traitorous act to ensure that the ending is never in question. Cathy is going to die, and she is going to leave Heathcliff unmoored.
That death will be a direct result of the ugly ways the people in this story treat each other, but there was never any pretense that this eventual cruelty would come to pass. Cathy “can’t escape the storm” of Heathcliff, and he will always be left begging on his knees for her to “please rub the salt in my wounds.”
By the time the gothic melodrama ends, the movie is everything Fennell promised that it would be. From the hauntingly grotesque chemistry between Robbie and Elordi to Charli XCX’s anguished songs to Linus Sandgren’s sweeping cinematography to Suzie Davies’ unsettlingly unrestrained production design to Jacqueline Durran’s bold, fantastical costumes, the story feels as heightened as any 14-year-old’s imagination.
Ultimately, it’s unnnerving. It’s overly dramatic. It’s incredibly horny. And it’s a reminder that a toxic love like Cathy and Heathcliff’s was never intended to be romantic; it was intended to be captivating. Fennell’s adaptation and Robbie and Elordi’s performances ensure this holds true.
“Wuthering Heights” is playing in theaters.
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